Despite their solitary lifestyle, wombats are at risk from a disease that spreads via their burrows.
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Articles on Marsupials
Displaying 1 - 20 of 63 articles
The tiny, mouse-like planigales are some of the smallest marsupials around – and there are two more species of them than anybody realised.
From the cuscus with the fancy coat, to the wallaby often sporting a single white glove, a wide variety of life evolved on island homes in the south-west Pacific.
Brain samples of a thylacine that died in 1880 in Berlin were kept safe by researchers for decades. Now, they have finally been analysed.
It’s not as well-known as the Hills Hoist clothesline, but here’s another Aussie invention worth celebrating: Glide poles are reconnecting severed landscapes for a special group of marsupials.
All mammals produce milk. But there’s no milk quite like that produced by monotremes and marsupials. Here’s what’s so special about it.
The ancestors of kangaroos once lived in the trees – but their evolutionary history is murky. Here’s everything we know so far.
Having special foot adaptations helped these sizeable animals wander long distances, which meant a better chance to find plentiful food and water.
Death by exhaustion, cannibalism, complete body fusion: across the animal kingdom, mating takes many strange forms.
Mammals have evolved flight more often than birds. By studying the genes of the sugar glider, biologists have found a ‘molecular toolkit’ for flight membranes that’s been in us all along.
Australia’s Red Centre was once a lush forest filled with strange creatures – and we are slowly discovering more about this enigmatic past.
80,000 years ago, Australia’s landscape was dominated by much larger versions of today’s marsupials – including enigmatic and enormous wombats.
The same technology found in a widely used COVID-19 vaccine could be the key to helping save wild Tassie devils – without any needles.
The teeth of the tammar wallaby don’t grow in the way you’d expect – and scientists want to know why.
Researchers are in a race against time to learn about the female-oriented social structures of Australia’s small native rodents and marsupials.
The 1878, the body of Sergeant Michael Kennedy lay in the bush in Victoria’s Wombat Ranges. He’d been shot by the notorious Ned Kelly gang – but the bush would add its own gruesome ending.
Two newly discovered species of quokka-sized kangaroos, which lived 18 million years ago in the Queensland rainforest, show evolution in the act of giving kangaroos a taste for leaves.
The numbat is one of the Tasmanian tiger’s closest surviving relatives. And its newly sequenced genome raises the possibility of piecing together the genetic code of its extinct fellow marsupial.
Quenda are one of few remaining digging mammals in Australian urban bushlands, and fungi is their favourite food.
When a plant is stressed, it mobilises its resources and often converts its starch reserves back to sugar. As soon as this happens, the stressed plant becomes sweeter than its healthier neighbours.
Top contributors
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Reproductive Biologist, Wildlife Conservation & Science, Zoos Victoria, and Honorary Research Associate, BioSciences, The University of Melbourne
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Curator of Mammals, Western Australian Museum
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Lecturer in Palaeontology, The University of Queensland
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Professor, Flinders University
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Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University
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Associate Professor, Biology, Zoology, Animal Science, Western Sydney University
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Lecturer in Biology, University of Salford
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Lecturer, Macquarie University
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Deputy Director, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University
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Associate Professor in Zoology, University of Tasmania
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Academic in Ecology and Environmental Science, Queensland University of Technology
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Professor, Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, UNSW Sydney
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Senior lecturer, Charles Sturt University
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Associate Professor, Monash University
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Lecturer in Palaeontology, Flinders University
